I BLAMED MYSELF FOR MY PARENTS’ TOXIC MARRIAGE

WHEN I think of Fifties Britain, I think of sitting on the stairs of our council house, listening to Uncle Reg trying to talk Mum out of getting divorced from my dad: ‘You can’t! What will people think?’

The truth is that Stanley and Sheila Dwight should never have got married. They just didn’t get on. They were both stubborn and short-tempered, two delightful characteristics that it’s been my huge good fortune to inherit.

The rows at home were endless. At least they subsided when my dad, who was in the RAF, was posted abroad. If I was marginally less terrified of him than I was of my mother, it was only because he wasn’t around as much.

When she was happy, Mum could be warm and charming and vivacious, but she always seemed to be looking for a reason not to be happy, always seemed to be in search of a fight.

Uncle Reg famously said she could start an argument in an empty room.

She thought there was nothing wrong with children that couldn’t be cured by thumping the living daylights out of them — petrifying and humiliating when it happened in public.

There’s nothing like getting a hiding outside Pinner Sainsbury’s, in front of several visibly intrigued onlookers, for playing havoc with your self-esteem.

And, years later, I found out that when I was two, she’d toilet-trained me by hitting me with a wire brush until I bled if I didn’t use the potty.

I loved her — she was my mum — but I spent my childhood in a state of high alert, always trying to ensure I never did anything that might set her off. So I was incredibly insecure, scared of my own shadow.

On top of that, I thought I was somehow responsible for the state of my parents’ marriage because a lot of their rows were about how I was

Tension: Sheila with Elton as a toddler and (left) mother and son in 2003 being brought up. It didn’t make me feel very good about myself, which manifested in a lack of confidence in my appearance. For years, I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror. I really hated what I saw: I was too fat, too short, my face just looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it to, including not prematurely falling out. The other lasting effect was a fear of confrontation. That went on for decades. I stayed in bad personal and business relationships because I didn’t want to rock the boat. My response, when things got too much, was always to run upstairs and lock the door, which is exactly what I did when my parents fought.